Intel’s Moblin 2.0 platform could be well-named, with the chipmaker hoping its open source Linux OS will deliver a two second boot time.
Forget about standby-resume routines, sleep modes and even ‘pre-boot’ environments like
Splashtop. Intel reckons you’ll soon be able to take your netbook a cold start to a desktop that’s ready for work in just two seconds.
That’s the target for Moblin, the mobile-optimised Linux variant which Intel is developing for netbooks and mobile Internet devices.
Intel wants to streamline Moblin 2 (shown above in its alpha core build) so that netbooks start up in two seconds
Demonstrating the current alpha build of Moblin 2.0 at this month’s Linux Collaboration Summit in San Francisco, Imhad Sousou – director of Intel’s Open Source Technology Centre – showed that major components of the Linux engine, including the graphics stack, load in under five seconds.
The challenge is trimming this down even further to the point where a netbook’s total startup time is just two seconds. But Sousou declared that “we think that two second boot is possible.”
Such rapid startup times are less vital for netbooks than for a broader range of consumer devices from MIDs to in-car entertainment and navigation systems which Intel wants to see powered by an Atom processor.
Intel has released an alpha build of the Moblin 2.0 core for
downloading as a Moblin Live build to run from a USB flash drive or as a virtual machine to run under VMware or KVM.